This is part of a series exploring the Port of San Francisco restaurants. These waterfront spots embrace and reflect the city's oldest - and newest - culinary traditions, and have plenty of stories to tell. Previous articles are at www.sfgate.com/food and www.sfchronicle.com/food.

Every restaurant on Fisherman's Wharf has a claim to fame. Castagnola's - the two-story, neon-lit leviathan at the intersection of Jefferson and Jones - has at least two.

It's the oldest restaurant on the wharf, dating to 1916. And it claims to have invented the Dungeness crab cocktail.

Legend has it that one of the restaurant's founders, Tomaso Castagnola, created the cold dish for the World's Fair in 1915. A year later, he opened a crab stand on the wharf.

Like so many others in the area, the crab stand evolved into a restaurant over the years. Castagnola ran the place until Andrew Lolli bought it for $3 million in 1976.

The late Lolli was a retired U.S. Army general who, as Herb Caen put it, proved that everybody's secret ambition is to run a restaurant. Lolli served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam before entering the hospitality business. He ran Castagnola's into his 90s, and in 2003 passed the business on to his stepdaughters, Kathy Higdon and Cindy Foxworth.

If they were around today, Castagnola and Lolli might do a double take at the souvenir shop enveloping the entrance to the restaurant.

Beyond the "Twerk or Die" T-shirts and Honey Badger hoodies lies the massive 270-seat establishment. Live music is a frequent occurrence in the street-side bar; on a recent evening, a charismatic piano man in a Giants cap crooned to the crowd of tourists, honoring requests for Billy Joel and Guns N' Roses.

The sprawling, multilevel dining room, with its dramatic floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the docks, carries a sense of old-school grandeur and scale not often seen in the city these days. The splendor of the design is dimmed by the details, though, be it stale upholstery on the plush booths or sticky tabletops.

The menu touts local producers like Wedemeyer Bakery and America's Best Coffee. Like many of its neighbors, Castagnola's offers a familiar slate of foods anchored in Italian American seafood, pasta and steaks.

That aforementioned crab cocktail comes as advertised, a generous portion of seafood overflowing from a silver chalice full of cocktail sauce and lettuce strips, with Saltines on the side. Clam chowder bread bowls and fried calamari are frequent sights around the dining room, and every once in a while, a well-informed diner may don a paper bib for the cioppino.

The restaurant pays homage to its military history on the cocktail menu via a Purple Heart Martini (a sweet concoction of vodka, Blue Curacao, Chambord, simple syrup and cranberry juice), though a local connection is more tenuous for its $12 siblings on the drink menu: Caribbean Cosmo and Sex on the Wharf.